ART

ART; Who Painted This Picture?

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: August 9, 1992

The painting that changed everything for Norman Wasserman -- the one he calls his "possible Pollock" -- insinuated itself into his life in the spring of 1954. Over the next 38 years it would lay claim to his affections, propel him into a bruising, apparently hopeless, battle with the art establishment and, finally, win the support of one of the most influential art critics of the 20th century.

Mr. Wasserman belongs to a species all too familiar to art dealers and auction houses. He is a prime example of the collector with a single artwork that has become an all-consuming obsession, a kind of stage parent who knows in his heart that his child possesses talent and genius, regardless of what the so-called experts might say. More than sensitive feelings are at stake. Pollocks fetch millions at auction. Sometimes lots of millions. In 1989, "No. 8, 1950" sold for $11.55 million at Sotheby's.

If Mr. Wasserman is a familiar type, his story, like his painting, has some unusual features. It begins when Mr. Wasserman, now 67, was a young entrepreneur setting up a business in Greenwich Village called Phone-a-Book. The ill-fated venture was the literary equivalent of Domino's Pizza. New Yorkers who read a book review in the Sunday paper could get any title that same day simply by picking up the telephone and dialing WA4-1555. A fleet of 23 cars, driven by friends and relations of Mr. Wasserman, stood ready to speed copies door to door.

As Mr. Wasserman prepared to set up shop at 240 West 10th Street, he says, he noticed a frame shop two doors down that was in the process of relocating. He wandered in looking for bargains. For less than $100 he walked out with assorted fixtures, a Bruegel and a Matisse print, a worm-eaten chestnut picture frame, a small abstract painting, and a strange 23-by-39-inch unframed canvas covered with loops and swirls of black enamel and yellow and aluminum paint.

Mr. Wasserman liked the painting. "My first impression, and one that has continued, is that it's almost orchestral," he said in an interview at his Brooklyn Heights apartment, pacing in front of the painting that has brought him both pleasure and inordinate stress. "It's symphonic, with all the notes still jockeying for position."

At other times, Mr. Wasserman reads the painting as a psychic map, the poignant record of an artist waging an unequal struggle with his personal demons. Sometimes he enjoys it as a purely formal exercise.

With time, the Bruegel print fell into tatters. The Matisse print was stolen. Mr. Wasserman painted what he admits is "an awful still life" to put in the chestnut frame, and he gave away the small abstract painting. But he held on to the drip painting. As he moved from place to place, he would stuff it under a bed, or park it in the back of a closet. Sometimes he hung it on the wall. Occasionally, friends would comment on its resemblance to the work of a painter named Jackson Pollock.

In 1959, says Mr. Wasserman, Conrad Janis, a son of Sidney Janis, who became Pollock's dealer in 1952, attended a party at Mr. Wasserman's loft. As Mr. Wasserman tells it, Mr. Janis sat in front of the painting and pondered it; after an hour's rumination he delivered a backhanded endorsement: "You know, there's nothing about this painting to suggest that it's not a Pollock. You should check it out." (Mr. Janis, a musician who lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., says he does not recall the encounter.) Mr. Wasserman says that Mr. Janis then advised him to show the painting to Lee Krasner Pollock, the artist's widow. Pollock had died in a car crash on Long Island, on Aug. 11, 1956.

In October, Mr. Wasserman wrote to Krasner, who agreed to look at the painting at her home on East 72d Street. Mr. Wasserman says that she examined the painting, turned it every which way, and in the end, with some puzzlement, declared that she could not be sure. Ordinarily, she knew instantly whether a Pollock was genuine or not, Mr. Wasserman remembers her as saying. She held onto the painting for three days but remained undecided.

"I keep coming back to it," Mr. Wasserman recalls her as saying. "It's familiar, but I want to be absolutely positive. I don't understand where it came from." She said she would like to see the painting again at a later date. Mr. Wasserman picked up the work and left.

That was the last meeting between the two. Attempts on both sides to arrange another viewing fell through for one reason or another, and eventually the correspondence lapsed. Krasner died in 1984. As Prices Rise, Forgers Take Note

Mr. Wasserman had long since folded the Phone-a-Book business and found work writing for various trade publications. Then, in 1968, he worked as a corporate speechwriter for the public relations firm of Ruder & Finn, where he became a vice president before retiring in 1986. Meanwhile, Pollock's reputation soared. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at $80,000. When Krasner offered the finest of her husband's works to the Whitney Museum of Art for $10,000 to $12,000, she was turned down because the price was considered exorbitant. Just 17 years later, the Australian National Gallery paid more than $2 million for Pollock's "Blue Poles," a record for an American painting. As the prices rose, forgers took note.